Richard Cottingham | The New York Ripper - Part 2
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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast, the podcast dedicated to serial killers, who they were, what they did, and how.

I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Weiborg-Thu, and tonight, dear listener, we continue our expose of the torso killer, Mr. Richard Cottingham. We will delve more deeply into his acts as a serial killer and the events leading up to his eventual arrest and conviction.

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We ended part one of the tale of Richard Cottingham exploring details into how he was a paraphilic and a torture killer. In other words, Cottingham was sadistic, and he enjoyed both causing extreme pain, act-out sexual violence, and the act of killing itself.

Sometimes, if he lost control over himself, he would kill his victim before being totally sexually satisfied. For example, his victims would die of shock trauma, they would bleed out, or he would hit them so hard it would cause fatal brain injury.

In these cases, he would be even more enraged and end up mutilating the victim's corpse in various extreme ways. He got his nickname of torso killer since his victims sometimes were found without both head and hands. But if torture-murder was not enough...

A year after his latest kill, Cottingham would delve even deeper into depravity. At the tail end of November, back in 1979, a man registered as Carl Wilson of Merlin, New Jersey, had booked a room at the Travel Inn Motor Lodge. This establishment still actually exists, but is now called the Travel Inn Hotel New York on 42nd Street.

The hotel is not very aesthetically pleasing to look at. It consists of a mid-size four-story brick building complex, and it is orange in color. It has a small swimming pool in the back and offers free parking to its patrons. It looks very much like you would imagine a budget hotel in New York would look in the late 1970s.

The hotel is located just two blocks from Times Square, making it a very affordable and attractive option for today's tourists looking to explore Manhattan. And back in the late 70s, it was an excellent option for a man looking to have some private time with prostitutes indulging in dark fantasies. The so-called Carl Wilson was in his 30s, fairly tall with sandy hair.

Staff at the hotel remembered that he placed a Do Not Disturb sign on the door of room 417, and they didn't see him again. The room was very quiet for four days. No one noticed anything, but behind the plain door of room 417, one could be justified in saying Hell had made a cameo performance on Earth.

Carl Wilson was, of course, none other than Richard Cottingham, and he had picked up two prostitutes. One was a 23-year-old immigrant from Kuwait called Didi Goddarsi. She was attractive, with thick, curly, dark hair, high cheekbones, and fine olive skin. To support herself and her four-month-old infant child,

She had seen no other options in the poverty-ridden New York of the time than to turn to selling sex, the other woman we know very little about. She was in her late teens or early twenties, and she is still only known as Jane Doe. It was now the 2nd of December, and the streets of New York were especially dismal and freezing cold.

The two young women were only too happy to get into the warm car of the plain-looking man, who wanted a couple of hours of sex with the two of them back at his hotel. None of them could have imagined the horrors inflicted upon them by Cottingham before he finally was satisfied and stole their lives as well. When the three of them was in his room, he somehow managed to get both of them tied up.

He probably did this by explaining he was into S&M, sexual games, and offered to pay them extra for the privilege. When both women were securely tied down, his mask of sanity fell away and he started to torture them. Instead of just using a rubber hose to beat them, as he had done so many times before, this time he escalated and used a knife.

Both women were subjected to him carving long, shallow gashes into their torsos, especially on and around their breasts. None of the knife wounds penetrated through the organs beneath and were done simply to induce pain and fear. He took his time. Forensic pathologist Dr. Louis Napolitano is on record saying, and I quote,

Cottingham was teasing them. He was saying, I'm not doing anything to kill you right away. I'm not putting a knife in your chest or cutting or making you die right away. No, I want you to know I'm here doing these things to you and I can and I will make it worse. End quote. When the victims were covered in slash wounds and slick with blood,

Their mouths gagged so no one could hear their increasingly hoarse screams. He put away his knife and pulled out his penis. He then brutally raped both women, both anally and vaginally, without any use of lubrication, adding to the pain, humiliation and unimaginable fear.

After ejaculating inside the bodies, and here, dear listener, you must remember that DNA testing was not something killers had to worry about back in 1979, he proceeded to manually strangle both women, one at a time, making sure the other young woman was witness to what she would endure only minutes later. Covered in blood, he then took a shower to clean himself up,

and put on a fresh set of clothes. He also made sure to neatly fold both women's clothing in the bathtub before dosing both corpses with an accelerant as a final act of defiance. He then lit the women on fire and the room itself on fire before quietly exiting the establishment and driving away before the fire trucks appeared.

There are especially two scenarios where police will have a very hard time finding evidence leading to a suspect. The one, murder victims where the corpse has been submerged in water for a long period of time, and the other where murder victims had their corpses been completely burned.

Today, we have sophisticated tools at hand, where microscopic clues can be obtained from even the most destroyed human body, especially DNA. However, back in 1979, this was not the case, and police were left clueless at the crime scene at a traveling motor lodge. Now, dear listener...

There is a great episode in the French true crime series Investigations and Revelations I would advise you to take a look at. Nadia Fezzani did an in-depth feature about serial killers and especially the crimes of Richard Cottingham. Researching the case, she actually booked room 417 prior to interviewing Cottingham. She said in the show she felt a shiver.

and felt like she was in a horror film. This is naturally purely a psychological phenomenon, as the hotel room looks little as it did back in December of 1979, since the hotel has been significantly refurbished and redecorated in the interim. Fezzani actually managed to interview Richard Cottingham. According to him, he only allowed this since he really liked her, especially how she looked.

"'Fedzani is a very attractive young woman, "'looking very much like many of the young women Cottingham ended up killing. "'When asked why, he did what he did. "'Cottingham told Fedzani, and I quote, "'I enjoyed it. It was a game. "'It's scary to a girl to have something done like that, "'to be so close to the knife, so to speak, pressed against you. "'The situations that I was seeking—'

End quote. For Dee Dee Godarzy, whose street names were Jacqueline Thomas, Sabrina Roberts and Crystal Roberts, and her fellow victim Jane Doe,

This destiny was death. The only thing police knew about Jane Doe was that she weighed around 110 pounds, that's around 50 kilos, and that on the night of her murder she wore a pair of bonjour jeans, a mohair sweater in the shade of dark burgundy, and black patent leather boots, all topped by a black full-length coat.

Police hung posters with pictures of these articles of clothing, hoping someone would recognize them and identify the girl. But no one ever did. While Cottingham's slow, shallow cuts with the knife was made as a twisted version of sensual foreplay leading up to a brutal rape, he cut off the two women's heads and hands for more matter-of-fact reasons.

He simply wanted to make it harder to identify the victims. The torsos were thus left to burn while he took their heads and hands in a duffel bag as he walked away. He actually brags about this to Fazzani in her interview, saying, I had nerves of steel. When I disposed of the heads, I took them out of the hotel.

"'Two cops actually pulled me over, "'and they saw me with a carry-all bag at 3.30 in the morning. "'They asked me what I was doing. "'I said I was staying in the hotel and was going to get something to eat. "'Without batting an eye, they would believe me. "'They never asked what was in the bag, or for any idea or anything like that. "'I could make people believe what they wanted to believe. "'It's godlike, almost.'

It would be safe to say that in addition to being paraphilic, a torture killer and a sexual psychopath, Cottingham was also an extreme narcissist. When Cottingham was safely away from the hotel, the first firefighter to arrive on the fourth floor where the fire had started was James Rogers.

He was in full smoke-diver gear, and the smoke was thick and dark, pouring out of room 417. He entered the room and managed to see the outlines of two bodies, one on each of the room's twin beds. He grabbed the one closest to the door first. He carried the body a small distance away and prepared to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But as he bent down, he noticed there was no head.

He went back to the room and picked up the second body and quickly noticed that she, too, had no head. In his own words, Rogers stated as follows, I'm used to seeing charred bodies, but this was the worst experience I've ever had in 12 years of firefighting. I've never come across something like that. I hope I never do again."

The heads and hands of the bodies had been removed with surgical precision, suggesting that the killer hadn't rushed a job, but had taken his time to get it right. A detective later told a reporter with the New York Times that the crime scene, despite the desecration, had been swept clean of clues, and in terms of evidence, was one of the most effectively swept rooms he'd ever seen.

while the investigation was rapidly grinding to a halt. Back in the insurance company where Cottingham worked, everyone was talking about gruesome murders. Cottingham's co-worker, Volpe, said in an interview that he asked Cottingham who could have done something so sick as to take the heads and hands of a girl and set the beds and body on fire. Cottingham answered, and I quote,

I don't know, Rob. Could have been you. It could have been me. End quote. Cooperation between police districts have a poor reputation, especially up until the 1990s in the USA. This was no exception, and New Jersey police did not make a connection between the Mary Ann Carr murder case and the double murder over in Manhattan, New York City.

Also, Mary Ann Carr had not been mutilated as severely as Dede Godarcy and Jane Doe, and due to the severe burn damage, investigators didn't notice any bite marks on Dede and Jane's breasts. And in any case, New Jersey police would soon be too busy to concern themselves with a double homicide in New York,

Because at the Quality Inn Motel, the same one that Mary Ann Carr had been found at, another body would soon be found. Imagine, if you will, dear listener, being a housekeeper at a hotel. It's the 5th of May, 1980. It's a beautiful day, 22 degrees Celsius, blue skies and sunny. The air is spring crisp, and you're probably in a good mood.

Marianne Sancanelli was experiencing this and was working her shift at a Quality Inn motel. She had recently started cleaning room 132 when she noticed that although one of the room's two beds had not been slept in, the bedspread was crooked and pulled down at a foot. When she tried to vacuum beneath the bed, her vacuum hit something rather large.

an object that was big enough to block the foot of the bed. It was then that she noticed a stench in the room that, luckily for her, was unfamiliar. It was a foul odor, similar to that of a mixture of feces and spoiled meat. When she lifted the mattress from the frame, she was stunned by the sight before her. Under the bed lay a young, pretty, naked dead woman,

She was handcuffed with her hands twisted behind her, and her perky breasts were jutting out. Her hair was strawberry blonde, she was about 5'4" and 135 pounds, that's about 60 kilos, and she had clearly been through hell before being murdered. Her name was Valerie Ann Street,

and only reached the tender age of nineteen before Cottingham took her life away. She had been tortured severely, and the handcuffs that held her hands were so tight they left deep, raw, red gouges that resembled gory bracelets around her wrists. The torture Cottingham had inflicted upon her consisted of a combination of all the various tortures he had inflicted upon previous victims—

She had been slashed many times with a knife, shallow slices, that were made to inflict pain and not death. Her entire body was covered in blue, purple, and black bruises, resulting from being beaten extensively by Cottingham's fists and rubber hose, and her left breast had its nipple nearly torn off from a bite mark.

As the other victims, she had probably tried her best to scream for her life until she lost her voice. But no one would have been able to hear her as she had her mouth taped shut with duct tape. The torture had probably lasted for several hours before Cottingham finished her off by raping her and then strangling her to death, manually, from the front.

so he could watch the life go out of her eyes. Unlike the New York crime scene, Valerie Ann's clothes were missing from the motel room, as well as any other identifying items she had with her. The aforementioned Dr. Louis Napolitano, of the Bergen County Medical Examiner's Office, was the one conducting the autopsy of Valerie Ann Street.

According to his report, she had endured torture for over 24 hours before the time of her death. Her body was kept in the Bergen County Morgue for over a month, and the only evidence left behind in the room was a single latent fingerprint on the set of handcuffs and a broken piece of herring. Identifying Valerie Ann proved difficult, as she had checked into the motel under the pseudonym Shelley Dudley,

But authorities managed to find out her identity, based on her fingerprints in the Florida crime files, for a conviction on prostitution charges. She had only been in New York City for four days. She had left Florida on the 30th of April, and on the 3rd of May was working the corner of Madison Avenue and 32nd Street. A prostitute named Chyna

said she'd last seen Valerie Ann on the 4th of May on the same corner. What made this murder scene turn the hunt for the torso killer from a cold case to a slightly warmer one was the fact that Valerie Ann was the second victim found at this hotel in a fairly short period of time, and she had very similar wounds as Mary Ann Carr. It's that time of the year. Your vacation is coming up.

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Visit betterhelp.com slash serialkiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash serialkiller. Dear listener, you might remember my interview with Dr. Al Carlyle.

In that interview, we discussed how many serial killers portray many similar traits as those suffering from addiction and obsessive-compulsive behavior. As with addicts of heroin, are always chasing for that ultimate high, that feeling they have the first time they tried heroin. Serial killers often chase the euphoric feeling they experienced when killing their first victim.

However, since nothing matches the first high, the killers turn to more and more extreme methods, with often shorter and shorter time between kills, in order to feel as powerful and godlike as the virgin kill made them feel. Richard Cottingham's case was a textbook example of this.

And this cooling-off period between attacks drastically went down from years to months to just over a week. On the 12th of May, 1980, Cottingham dumped cocktail waitress Pamela Weissenfeldt in a parking lot in Teaneck, New Jersey. She too had been drugged, beaten severely, and her breasts were bitten severely as if by a wild beast.

This time, though, the bite marks were not limited to the breasts. Her entire body was riddled with them. Luckily, she managed to survive, and this would bite Cottingham in the rear later on. But it got worse. Only three days after the discovery of Pamela Weissenfeld, another escalation also presented itself.

Firefighters were called to the Seville Hotel on East 29th Street, where they once again found a mutilated young woman with multiple deep bite marks marring her body. This time, too, the body had been set on fire in order to erase as much evidence as possible. Cottingham had chosen not to cut off her head and hands,

but had instead sliced off both her breasts and presented them neatly on the headboard of the bed frame. Based on fingerprints and photograph recognition, the victim was soon identified as 25-year-old Jean Rayner, a prostitute who worked the derelict Times Square area.

So strong were the similarities between Rayner's murder and earlier cases that police now no longer was in any doubt as to this being the work of a serial killer. Even though they now knew what they were hunting, they did not know who and the killer had made sure to sanitize the room, virtually sterilizing it of any identifying clues that would lead to his capture.

The killer now had two nicknames in the media, the Times Square Ripper and the Torso Killer, depending on which media outlet was reporting on the case. Meanwhile, in the Cottingham household, the idyllic facade was slipping. Cottingham's wife had filed for divorce, charging him with extreme cruelty, especially for his refusal to have sex with her since late 1976.

This was an era before the time of Viagra and other male potency pills, and it is very likely that he didn't want to engage in sex with his wife, since he could only perform sexually if he stood before a helpless, naked, bloody young woman tied mercilessly to a bed.

Richard Cottingham was not a man known for his calm and easy-going attitude, and the troubles at home built a rage inside of him he would not be able to control. In his mind, he was being humiliated by his wife. Someone, someone had to pay. Leslie Ann O'Dell was a pretty blonde girl who was only five foot four inches.

She had been selling sex on the corner of Lexington Avenue and 25th Street for about a week when she encountered Richard Cottingham. She was only 18 years old and very naive, just the type of girl Cottingham was hunting for. He called himself Tommy. He took her to a bar and plied her with drinks, droning on about his computer job and his house in the suburbs.

He talked until 3 a.m., before offering to help her escape the pimps that controlled so many aspects of her young life. She accepted, and he offered to take her to a bus terminal in New Jersey, far away from those dangerous people in New York City. They stopped at an all-night diner called New Star Diner, where he bought her a steak, and he talked some more.

Eventually, Leslie agreed to have sex with him for $100, money that would help her get away from her life as a New York street prostitute. The sun was rising when Richard Cottingham was once more checking into the Quality Inn motel. Leslie was waiting in the car as he returned with the keys to room 117.

He left to park his car properly and returned after a while with whiskey and a bag. To warm things up, he offered to give her a back massage, and the exhausted young girl rolled under her stomach. He straddled her back, but instead of massage oil and gentle hands caressing her body...

Cottingham pulled out a knife from the bag and held it to her throat, subduing her, while he handcuffed her arms behind her back. He turned her over, straddled her again, and told her he was going to torture her, how she was a whore that deserved all the pain he was about to inflict upon her. He made his first few cuts into her young flesh,

and explained how he soon would be burning her breasts, her genitals, her anus, and how much he derived pleasure from watching her suffer and her futile attempts at escape. As Leslie struggled to understand what was happening to her,

She suddenly felt Cottingham's teeth on her nipple, a jagged pain, and she saw blood pouring forth from his lips. He bit deep, nearly tearing the nipple off, and proceeded to lick up her blood. Following this, he continued to torture her, rape her both vaginally and anally, as well as forcing her to perform oral sex on him. During the entire ordeal, he was talking,

He kept telling her how other girls had taken it, and that she too had to take it. Between the bouts of torture, the rape, the sodomy, the oral rape, between the biting, the beatings, knife wounds and whipping with a leather belt, between all that, in order to make it all last longer, he would wipe Leslie's face with a washcloth to soothe her and bring her back from the brink of delirium

and unconsciousness. But even though Leslie was a naive young girl, she was not incapable of fighting back. At one point, when Cottingham had taken off her handcuffs to position her differently, she reached under the bed and took the gun Cottingham at one point had threatened her with. She pulled the trigger, but there was nothing but a click. The gun was fake, a prop to induce fear.

Cottingham was furious. She tried to fight him, and grabbed his knife and moved towards her. Nancy was at that point no longer gagged by duct tape, and she started screaming her lungs out, literally screaming for her life. As some of my dear listeners might have experienced, motel room walls are not particularly well soundproofed.

Her fearful cries alerted neighboring guests, and the front desk was called at 9.30 a.m., where the police was called. Police arrived quickly to the motel and raced to room 117 and shouted for Cottingham to open the door. When the door did open,

It was a terrified Leslie who had been instructed by Cottingham to say that she was fine before he positioned himself behind her, holding a knife to the side of her stomach. When asked if she was okay, she responded yes, but her eyes told a very different story. She moved them right to left, indicating that there was indeed a problem.

This time, Cottingham had allowed the pleasure he received from hearing his victim scream override his desire not to get caught. He failed to realize how loud Leslie's screams really were, and that made him careless. Cottingham realized he was out of luck, and instead of killing Leslie, he turned and ran out of the room's back door.

He even took the time to take his instruments of torture with him in a bag. This time the police was ready for him, and he was apprehended before he got very far. The bag contained duct tape, handcuffs, a leather gag, two slave collars, a switchblade, replica pistols and a stockpile of prescription pills, including Valium and barbiturates.

Officers Alan Greco and Ed Denning was the ones that had the pleasure of arresting Cottingham, a man they had been haunted by ever since they'd found Mary Ann Carr's lifeless body tossed carelessly against the New Jersey parking lot's chain-link fence. Cottingham was read his rights, and he quickly told the officers that the sex with Leslie Ann was consensual

and that she had agreed to let him do anything he wanted for $180. This was not very convincing, as you would be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to have their bodies severely cut up and their nipples nearly bitten off for $180. In the interrogation room, Denning and Grieco tried to play on Cottingham's narcissism by making the case all about him instead of the victims.

Ed Denning was holding his hand, and they were trying to make him confess. Cottingham's eyes welled up, and he said, I have a problem with women. He went on to say that his attack on Leslie was so savage because he was stressed about his divorce hearing, and that he had gone out to Times Square to get drunk, where Leslie Ann offered her services for $180.

He continually referred to Leslie Ann as the female subject, showing how much he objectified the young woman, even when facing authorities. Cottingham was not forthcoming with details, and was in no way cooperative with the police. Most questions he answered with evasive answers, or simply by saying he didn't remember, when presented with the severity of the wounds he had afflicted upon Leslie,

and realizing this was very incriminating, he stopped talking and asked for an attorney. When defense attorney Dean Conway first got a good look at his client, he was not impressed by what he saw. According to Conway, Cottingham was at best average looking and kind of stocky.

Also, Conway did not appreciate Cottingham's unwillingness to take responsibility for his actions, especially considering the mountain of evidence phasing him from both Leslie Ann's ravaged body into the bag of sadistic toys he'd carried with him as he tried to flee.

Police were now finally cooperating across jurisdictions and questioned Cottingham about the places he'd lived and murders he was now suspected of committing, based on his modus operandi. Cottingham remained tough, though, and simply said that he didn't have to say anything. But even though he had little to say, what police found at his home had plenty.

At Cottingham's home, Grieco and Denning found a secret room, a private room, in the basement. In it, the officers found a treasure trove of evidence. They found a tiny koala bear toy that Valerie Ann Street carried with her as a reminder of more innocent and happier times. And they found an apartment key that fit the door of Mary Ann Carr's apartment. They also found jewelry.

that he had taken as trophies from various victims. Eventually, the surviving victims, Karen Schilt and Susan Geiger, identified him as their attacker, and the evidence against him kept mounting. Cottingham remained silent, other than claiming his innocence, and on the 5th of October, 1980, through a second attorney named Peter Doyne,

He entered the plea of not guilty in front of Superior Court Judge Fred C. Golda. Cottingham was bound over for trial and held on a $350,000 bond, an amount that the middle-class Cottingham had no way of paying. Richard Cottingham must have seen what destiny awaited him.

And instead of giving the victims and their families the satisfaction of a trial, he tried to take control of his own destiny and commit suicide. However, he was not as proficient at taking his own life as he was with others. He first tried to use a broken piece of glass from a pair of glasses to slash his wrists.

But this only resulted in him not having his glasses, and a relative small amount of pain as he cut across his wrists instead of down. He eventually tried to kill himself a total of three times, but still ended up having to go to trial. Cottingham was facing multiple charges, in four separate trials in separate jurisdictions.

The charges included murder, attempted murder, robbery, aggravated assault, kidnapping, rape, as well as several drug-related charges. It is difficult to know exactly what Cottingham thought, but during court proceedings, he went from being stone-cold silent to singing like a canary. His lawyer expressively warned him that taking the stand would most probably incriminate him further,

But maybe Cottingham simply wanted to enjoy his moment of fame. He took the stand and started telling the judge and jury about how he had fantasized about tying up defenseless women since late childhood. He explained how he made his victims call him master, and if they failed to do so, there were dire consequences. He did, however, reject any notion that he had murdered anyone.

claiming that he was either at work or with his girlfriend, while four of the five incidents he was charged with occurred. He denied the mutilation and murder of Valerie Ann Street, who was just 18 when she made the mistake of picking Cottingham as her next customer. Even though the prosecution had presented Cottingham's fingerprint on the very handcuffs found around her corpse's wrists, he brushed it off,

as if it was nothing of concern. He denied kidnapping and assaulting Susan Geiger, Pamela Weissenfeldt, and Karen Schilt, even though they all took the stand and pointed him out as their assailant. When Leslie O'Dell, the brave young woman who through her bravery and quick thinking managed to produce Cottingham's arrest, took the stand, her testimony was as detailed as it was damning.

Bergen County's prosecutor in the case against Cottingham did not like his suspect very much. He knew Cottingham was an intelligent man, but not nearly as smart as the suspect thought he was.

To make matters worse for Cottingham, his co-worker of several years, Volpe, took the stand to explain how Cottingham had a habit of bragging about buying sex from prostitutes, and how he tricked them by spiking their drinks with drugs. In addition, the large amount of fiscal evidence, including several pieces of victims' jewelry found at Cottingham's home,

The many eyewitness accounts placing Cottingham near or at the crime scenes made sure that the prosecution's evidence was overwhelming. And so it was that on June in 1981, Richard Francis Cottingham was convicted on 15 of the 21 felony counts he had originally faced. His conviction hit his ego hard

And again, Cottingham tried to end his own life by drinking six ounces of liquid antidepressants. The prison guards found him in time, and after being pumped at the nearby Hackensack Hospital, he was transported back to prison. In the following month of July, Cottingham was sentenced to 173 to 197 years in prison.

for the murders of Valerie Ann Street and the assaults of the four other women, including Leslie O'Dell. He was also fined $2,350, and he would not be eligible for parole for at least 30 years. Now, dear listener, rest assured.

This is not one of those cases where a serial killer is convicted of only a fraction of his crimes and ends up with a sentence he can possibly be paroled from. Cottingham's days in a courtroom were far from over. He still faced multiple charges, including the murder of Marian Carr. Three days into that trial, on the 25th of February 1982,

Cottingham collapsed in an elevator while being escorted back to his jail cell, and he was soon to be diagnosed with duodenal ulcer, and a mistrial was declared after a motion of a retrial by the defense. It was not a long wait until the case came up again, and on the 28th of September 1982, Cottingham again went on trial for the murder of Marianne Carr.

This time he asked for a non-jury trial, hoping that he could convince Judge Fred C. Golder of his innocence. The trial did not go well, as the prosecution continued to present one piece of damning evidence after another, such as the same taped residue on Carr's mouth as on Odell's. So, about a week into the trial, Cottingham tried to escape the proceedings.

and managed to get as far as outside the courthouse. Alan Grieco got the rare pleasure of capturing the serial killer he had hunted twice, as he spotted Cottingham running away from the courthouse, and managed to tackle him to the ground. On the 13th of October, after just over two weeks of testimony, Cottingham was found guilty of the murder of Mary Ann Carr by Judge Calder.

On the 15th of October, he was sentenced to 25 years to life, with a minimum of 30 years to be served consecutively with his previous sentence. This would mean his first chance of parole would be in 2042. But justice was still not completely served, and after having yet again failed to kill himself using a razor to cut his forearm,

He was convicted in New York of three additional murders and an additional 75 years to life in prison. On the 25th of August in 2010, Cottingham gave his first confession when he admitted to killing Nancy Skiava Vogel and surprisingly offered an apology to Vogel's brother and her two children who were in the courtroom. He was sentenced to another life sentence in prison.

This one to also run concurrent with his existing sentences. Richard Cottingham is currently serving out his sentence in New Jersey State Prison, and death in prison will be his end.

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And so ends part two of the tale of Richard Cottingham. In the next episodes covering this case, I will be interviewing someone very special in regards to the torso killer case. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. I have been your host, Thomas Weibogthu. Doing this podcast is a labor of love, and I couldn't have made this podcast without you, dear listener.

and especially those of you that support me via Patreon. You can do so at the serialkillerpodcast.com slash donate. There are especially a few patrons that have stayed loyal for a long time. Maud, Wendy, Kelly, Lisbeth, Sid and Meg, Sarah, Tommy, Charlotte and Craig. Your monthly contributions really help keep this podcast thriving.

You have my deepest gratitude. As always, thank you, dear listener, for listening. And feel free to leave a review on your favorite podcast app or website. And please do subscribe to the show if you enjoy it. Thank you. Good night and good luck.